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Held annually, Pubcon has been called a “must-attend” conference by Forbes, and features entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and digital marketing professionals hosting lectures and workshops on search engine advancement, online advertising, and social media. This year’s Pubcon was held in Las Vegas from October 6-9, and featured some amazing speakers with new thoughts and new ideas about the future shape of the industry. No single article can hope to cover every topic or every insight that arose during the four-day event, but I’m hoping to cover some of the most relevant.

These are my six biggest takeaways from the conference:

1. SEO Is Not a Separate Strategy. Speaker Bill Hunt acknowledged that most businesses tend to think of their SEO strategy as a separate campaign: an independent silo of work that’s completed apart from other business strategies, and often only as an afterthought to a website launch or branding strategy. However, Hunt claimed that SEO should be an improvement process that should be seamlessly intertwined with every other aspect of your business strategy.

I agree with Hunt’s assertion, especially with the experience I’ve had in helping other businesses and entrepreneurs get their SEO campaign up and running. There’s no way you can start an effective SEO campaign unless the rest of your business is tightly interwoven with it; it’s an extension of your core business plan. For example, how can you know what content topics are most important to your target audience if you don’t know who your target audience is? How can your organic traffic be valuable if your website is obsolete?

2. Mobile SEO Is Taking Over. We already knew that mobile optimization was important to consider, but Cindy Krum explained exactly how mobile SEO is taking over the world of search. Since mobile SERPs have fewer space above the fold, getting a top ranking is more important than ever—and PPC ads are becoming more prominent. Crum also revealed that more than one-third of all mobile searches have local intent, meaning local search queries are becoming increasingly dominant, and the Knowledge Graph plays a huge role in providing more relevant information to mobile searches.

Most entrepreneurs involved in SEO already know that they need to make adjustments for mobile visitors—but this usually translates to ensuring your site is optimized for a suitable experience on any device. What Crum is saying is that we need to completely rethink our priorities and values in the SEO world—is a 10th rank even significant if only a few SERP entries are above the fold? Do you even need to worry about rank if your local optimization is in order? Mobile is a bigger game-changer than we thought, and it’s only going to keep changing from here.

3. Robots Don’t Care About Your Content.People Do. Mineo of ThunderActive described a rift between writing for search optimization and writing for an audience. Writing for robots in an effort to boost your rank is ineffective, and will only become less effective over time. Instead, Mineo argued that you need to write for a specific audience, and to do that, you need to perfect your topic choices and your voice.

This is a fundamental principle, but Mineo summarized it perfectly. You aren’t writing content to please the robots that index pages for search engines. In fact, you can’t. Search algorithms today only care about one thing: giving users a great web experience. Instead of trying to use hacks and tricks to fool robots into thinking you’re giving a great web experience, why not give your users a great experience directly? Cut out that unnecessary middle man by pretending the robots don’t exist, and simply writing for your target audience.

4. “Helping” and “Selling” Are Only Two Letters Apart. According to Jay Baer, helping and selling are similar, but marketers need to prioritize the “helping” element of their marketing and advertising if they’re going to succeed in the long-term. Basic advertisements only try to sell a product, giving users limited information to persuade them to make a purchase. But helping is about creating a much longer relationship, prioritizing giving a customer a great experience over getting them to buy immediately.

The world of sales has changed significantly since the onset of digital marketing and online advertising. People can easily detect when they’re being advertised to, and they don’t trust advertisers. They do trust companies that provide them with information they need, and companies who have their best interests in mind. Therefore, it makes sense to prioritize that authoritative, “helpful” quality of your business before any other quality, and certainly before you start trying to sell anything. People buy from businesses they trust.